Uber Eats is readied to offer UK retailers courier picking, whereby Uber riders pick products from stores, pack and pay for them before delivering them to customers, The Grocer can reveal.
The aggregator confirmed the service was now available to merchants in the UK, having been announced as coming imminently in 2024.
“Uber Eats is a global leader in delivery innovation, including courier picking and it’s one of a range of solutions we’re able to offer retail partners in the UK,” a spokesperson told The Grocer.
The availability of the service follows a similar move by Deliveroo late last month. In an exclusive partnership with Aldi, Deliveroo couriers will pick, pack and deliver the discounter’s products to customers. The new ‘Shop & Deliver’ service is being trialled across eight stores and set to expand to further stores in early 2027.
Uber Eats does not yet have any active customers for its ‘Courier Pick & Pack’ service. The service was hailed as a first in Europe for a delivery platform, when it was initially announced in June 2024, following limited rollouts by Uber in the US, Japan and Australia.
At the time, Uber told The Grocer the service was “very well proven” and any rivals planning to build a similar service “would have a lot of work to catch up to where we are”.
Months later, Uber’s senior director of grocery and retail, EMEA & UK Alex Troughton, said: “These things aren’t easy and take a lot of time. We’re making sure we get it right from when we launch because it’s brand new.”
The ‘personal shopper’ concept of delivery couriers doing the customers shop and packing their order before delivering it, has been around for some time, but scaled most notably by Instacart in the US.
Instacart launched in the UK in July, with the start of a trial by Morrisons of its AI-powered smart shopping trolleys. The company has given no indication it is planning to import the personal shopper model on these shores, focusing instead on its Caper Carts and Instaleap software for supermarkets to manage orders across marketplace channels.
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